Story Highlights

“Boyhood” is not just a great movie, it’s a landmark achievement in film.

Wow. That sounds like a load of pretentious hyperbole. But it isn’t. Richard Linklater has taken an idea at once so simple yet so complex and turned it into a stunning movie about life, nothing less.

Again, this sounds pretentious. Again, it’s anything but.

Richard Linklater took 12 years to make the story of Mason (Ellar Coltrane), taking him from age 6 to age 18. Yes: The director got the cast together every year for a dozen years, shooting footage, then sending everyone their separate ways, only to reconvene the following year for more. Thus when we see Mason hit puberty, Coltrane is hitting puberty. As his parents (Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke) and sister (Lorelei Linklater, Richard’s daughter) age, it’s not a trick of makeup or special effects. They really are a year older, thinner, heavier, different hair, changing faces, whatever kinds of transitions real people undergo during the passage of time.

And that’s the thing: This could have been an interesting parlor trick and not much more. Instead, it is so much more. The temptation in shooting like this would be to tie each development to some sort of major life event, a cliff-hanger to move the audience from one age to the next.

Instead, Linklater does nothing of the sort. Things happen, of course – the movie is almost three hours long. But they are the sorts of things that happen to many of us. This took great patience on the part of Linklater, along with a lot of trust in his audience. Boy, does it pay off.

His mom, Olivia (Patricia Arquette) is divorced from Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke) when the film begins. She will weather more stormy relationships, but that’s about as melodramatic as things get. Mason Sr. is the type of dad in divorces who cruises up occasionally in his black Pontiac GTO to take the kids out for something fun. He’s a rogue charmer, perfectly willing to let Olivia do the heavy lifting of parenthood.

That she does, earning degrees and losing relationships while keeping the family afloat. Arquette, like the rest of the cast, is fantastic. There is a scene in which Mason is leaving for college. Olivia is obviously proud of Mason, but instead of being outwardly happy, she is angry and crying, and says, “This is the worst day of my life.”

Exactly! She captures the contradictions of parenthood in one sentence. It’s like when Bart Simpson hurt himself while defying his parents’ order not to jump over a car on his skateboard. Marge comforts him, while Homer shouts, “Marge! We’re mad at him!”

Mason is a sweet boy with soulful eyes. One of the pleasures of the film is how unpredictably he changes. He becomes interested in photography, finds a girlfriend, loses a girlfriend, gets a part-time job, , more complex recognizable moments that are remarkable only for their ordinariness, particularly in this context. Mason simply grows up, in other words. Linklater draws us into this boy’s life, this young man’s maturing, and it is captivating.We’re immersed in it, almost as deeply as the characters. We are so accustomed to gotcha moments in movies that, at first, it’s difficult not to expect one to rise up and smack us in the face. That feeling passes, however, as we return the trust in Linklater that he has shown in us. “Boyhood” doesn’t tell us how to think or how to feel. It simply lets Mason live his life, and allows us to be a part of it, in a remarkable way.